Over the next couple of weeks we will go on a journey about the neighborhood, a short walk, a stupendously harvestable walk: food, medicine, utility. Mineral, vegetable, animal, human. All here in abundance. The built environment, the waste stream, water pouring from the highest ridges, rivers of water teeming with possibility, coursing unforgivably down gutters and storm drains, when a simple ditch would do to keep the water where it falls. And the native overstory of this 250 year old settlement, rich in biomass for the taking: acorn, crabapple, mulberry, too much of it, too damn much of it under tire, become macadam, and all it takes is reaching hands, and a tongue to taste the delicate flesh, or bring some home in a basket to dry, jelly, jam, drink. Did not plant them. The birds did. Did not weed around their feet.
Where is the work in this, let alone the money? A mulberry is richer than a bank president. Its account is endless, and it will never go bankrupt.
So, let us begin at the house. I have to conjecture that this 110 year-old domicile was built with materials garnered from a small radius of the map. Modern transport had yet to become “bonified”. Every home on this street is different. The circa 1900 houses that have survived are unique, singular, have character, no cookie cutter monolithic “design” of later burbs. I wonder at the waste stream of 110 year ago. Where did it all go? What of grids, gas fired stoves, oil fired boilers, and two car garages stuffed with toxic metals, fluids, plastics, emissions?
A fifth of an acre is a large parcel in the context of the neighborhood. We have 250 species of plants imbibing in this postage stamp of an Eden. I have an image of what has taken root in this yard breaking the hard pan of this neighborhood, forging an interactive web of mycelial madness and ripping apart unsuspecting pansy beds, but not before I harvest the flowers for my next salad, and scaring the daylights out of Puff, the neighborhood cat, bird hunter extraordinaire.
These roots, grafted to countless other roots, congealing into a mass of yield, predicated on human health and sustenance, balancing what already exists into an ecosystemic whole.
Have we swapped the carbon budget for a name: Carbondale? Have we mined the guts of Southern Illinois to power our power? Or can we rename: Carbon-sequester-dale?
